The Man Who Couldn't Die

INTRODUCTION Ressentiment Monsters ^{MARK LIPOVETSKY}

I met Olga Slavnikova in 1987 or 1988. Back then we both lived in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg); she worked as an editor at Ural, the local “thick” and respectable literary magazine, and I was publishing my first articles in it. She had just finished a journalism degree at Ural State University (my alma mater too) and was launching her literary career, both as a prose writer (her first novella, A Freshman Girl, was published in 1988) and as a literary critic. We had many common interests—primarily the culture wars that were roaring around us—and quickly recognized each other as like-minded. The circle of young literati to which we belonged was mesmerized by the newly discovered continent of Russian underground and émigré modernist and postmodernist literature—from Vladimir Nabokov to Sasha Sokolov and Venedikt Erofeev—which started to appear in print after decades of censorship and about which we talked all the time.

This was the peak of perestroika, and Olga was an active participant in the literary innovations of the time. One such innovation was a “special” issue of Ural (1988, no. 1), which published a few pieces of nonconformist prose and avant-gardist poetry along with a radical (for the time) political-economic article. Although it was the latter that brought national recognition to this issue (according to rumors, it was resold on the black market at a vastly inflated price), Ural continued to publish less conventional literature in a “magazine within a magazine” entitled Text, with a belatedly Structuralist chic. Although not entirely independent from Ural’s management, Text published exciting prose and poetry by young and not-so-young writers who would otherwise never have appeared on the pages of any Soviet journal. The novelty of this literature was not political, it was aesthetic—most of the works published in Text not only deviated from Socialist Realism (which nobody took seriously anyway) but also disregarded social realism and the classical realist canon—which in the eyes of readers and the literary establishment was a much greater sin than being anticommunist.

At that time, however, nobody yet saw Slavnikova as a leader of the new literature from the Urals (or from Ural). This changed drastically after her first major novel, A Dragonfly Enlarged to the Size of a Dog (1997). Published in Ural, it was included on the short list for the Russian Booker Prize. Furthermore, A Dragonfly became the year’s greatest literary sensation—critics and readers alike noticed the novel and praised it as one of the brightest debuts of our generation. This was the work where Slavnikova found her original style. Valentin Lukianin, a critic and editor-in-chief of Ural in the 1980s and 1990s, aptly writes:

Slavnikova’s newfound style paradoxically fused the lessons of traditional realism and radical modernism. On the one hand, Slavnikova is attentive to the everyday life of poor and socially marginalized people, especially women. On the other, she enlarges the details of their ordinary existence with such a powerful “microscope” that they turn into surreal symbols, and through this metamorphosis her prose exposes life’s frequently morbid undercurrent. This approach, however, excludes a necessary component of the Russian literary tradition, the writer’s compassion for her characters. Slavnikova is truly mesmerized by her monstrous “everyday people,” but with the fascination of a scientist, she keeps her narrative distance, never allowing readers to identify with any of her characters. Her “coldness” stands for an unblinking analytical position, for an acidic skepticism hostile to any sweet illusions. Such a distancing is critical for all her works, but especially for The Man Who Couldn’t Die.

Almost all of Slavnikova’s subsequent novels would gain recognition and win literary prizes—the new style discovered in A Dragonfly proved flexible enough to absorb diverse themes and stories, all invariably associated with contemporary Russia. Her subsequent novel, Alone in the Mirror (1999), written while she still lived in Ekaterinburg, appeared in the prestigious Moscow journal Novyi Mir and won its award for the best publication of the year; her slightly dystopian 2017 (2006, translated into English by Marian Schwartz in 2012), which Slavnikova wrote after her move from Ekaterinburg to Moscow, received the Russian Booker Prize. Two of her latest novels—Light-Headed (2010, translated into English by Andrew Bromfield in 2015) and Long Jump (2018)—were both short-listed for the largest Russian literary prize, The Big Book, and the latter still has a chance to win it. The only exception is the novel that you are holding in your hands, The Man Who Couldn’t Die (or The Deathless in Russian), which first appeared in 2001, in the Moscow magazine October. Although it didn’t win any major literary awards, many critics consider it Slavnikova’s best and most accomplished work of literature—her true masterpiece.

Furthermore, The Man Who Couldn’t Die has a cloud of a scandal around it—and what could be better? Slavnikova claimed that the authors of the famous German film Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) plagiarized her plot. Both works juxtapose dramatic scenes of early postsocialist transition with the figure of an immobile elderly person—the paralyzed grandfather, a former wartime scout, in Slavnikova’s novel, and the comatose mother, a former Party activist, in Wolfgang Becker‘s film. In both works, relatives try to protect their weak-hearted elders from the shock of the revolution and its consequences by maintaining the illusion that things are the same as before in the USSR and GDR, respectively. To support this illusion, both Slavnikova’s and Becker’s characters produce fake newsreels for home TV.

Frankly, I don’t share Slavnikova’s concerns: I believe that the metaphor juxtaposing physical immobility and being stuck in the past and/or awakening in a different country was too obvious to anybody living through the postsocialist transition not to become a common trope. Furthermore, the radical differences between The Man Who Couldn’t Die and Good Bye, Lenin! are much more significant than their similarities. The latter is full of optimism and excitement around the long-awaited revolution, which is why the film became so popular worldwide, while Slavnikova’s novel tangibly delivers a sense of bitter disappointment—of what Nietzsche called ressentiment—in the fruits of the same revolution.

The concept of ressentiment—inferiority and weakness compensated for through hostility toward others, be it the authorities, immigrants, liberals, or Americans—has been frequently used to describe the situation in post-Soviet Russia. In the words of the philosopher and cultural historian Mikhail Iampolsky,

Slavnikova wrote her novel in the very beginning of the Putin era, in 2000–2001, but the atmosphere of ressentiment that she captures allows us to detect seeds of the future resonance between “ordinary people” and post-Soviet authorities. The novel’s plot develops along two parallel lines. One follows the meager life of a family fully dependent on the pension of its patriarch—the paralyzed and bedridden Alexei Afanasievich. The other traces the semilegal and outright illegal schemes and tricks accompanying elections in a small industrial town—probably somewhere in the Urals, but, actually, anywhere in Russia. As is clear from today’s perspective, these two plotlines diagnose two major sources of social malaise indicative of post-Soviet ressentiment: nostalgia for the Soviet past and popular revulsion toward democracy and democratic procedures.

Marina, the stepdaughter of the bedridden veteran and a journalist trying to win herself a place among the new power elite, connects both plotlines within the novel. But this link is almost mechanical; Slavnikova’s rich metaphors and leitmotifs establish much deeper connections between these two dimensions of the story.

Each of the three central characters in The Man Who Couldn’t Die has their own web of leitmotifs; taken together, they manifest the existential, rather than the political or psychological, “taste” of the post-Soviet nineties. Nina Alexandrovna, Marina’s mother and Alexei’s wife, is shell-shocked by life under capitalism and perceives everything outside the walls of her home as a chaotic confusion of phantoms and chimeras. She lives as if sleepwalking, and even the people she sees on the street look “blurred and slightly translucent.” Although her daughter, Marina, is much savvier about the new ways, she also perceives people as being “like shapeless specters.” Despite all her futile efforts to gain a stable and decently paid position as a journalist, she remains alienated from reality. The metaphors surrounding her variegate the motif of the void: “She was surrounded by a strange, lifeless emptiness”; “The world around her was surprisingly empty”; “ ‘There definitely isn’t going to be any money today. Beyond that, I don’t know,’ Marina said in a raspy, muffled voice into the nearest microphone, feeling an emptiness behind her”; “The emptiness before her was infinite, and she could only wade into it further and overcome the familiar resistance of a dimension without qualities”; etc.

Lost in the fog of ressentiment-bound nonreality, Nina and Marina join efforts to create—ostensibly for the paralyzed Alexei but in fact for themselves—a comforting illusion of Soviet “stability,” of things remaining unchanged forever under the portrait of Leonid Brezhnev (whose tenure in power exceeded Stalin’s but was shorter than Putin’s). Despite its obvious cheesiness (“It’s a prop right out of a Hollywood movie about Soviet life”), this home spectacle has a tangible effect on its participants. Alexei acquires a visible similarity to Brezhnev, growing into a symbol of the past era himself: “It turned out that Alexei Afanasievich had always been the creator and center of Soviet reality, which he’d managed to hold onto a little longer; and now this reality, squeezed to the size of their standard-issue living space, retained its permanence, inasmuch as its pillar had not disappeared.” The force of her stepfather’s “encapsulated time” helps Marina realize that nostalgia for the predictable monotony of Brezhnev’s Stagnation has already emerged as a powerful and wildly popular political force among the post-Soviet “electorate”: “Apofeozov’s chief opponent in the true elections… was, of course, not Krugal but Leonid Ilich Brezhnev.” Furthermore, while trying to strengthen her loyalty to the election campaign, Marina “voluntarily made herself the heart of the paralyzed era, the heroine of a Soviet film; in retrospect, she almost came to love the Young Communists and her fictional Party membership.”

The novel’s subtitle is a reference to a famous Socialist Realist novella from 1946 about a wartime pilot who continues to fly despite losing both legs to amputation after a battle injury. Marian Schwartz has translated this phrase as “The Tale of an Authentic Human Being” rather than “A Tale of the Real Man.” I can understand her choice—the epithet “authentic” (dopodlinnyi) and its derivatives frequently appear in the Russian original of the novel in association with the paralyzed veteran. Even Brezhnev’s portrait becomes more authentic in his proximity: “the general secretary, whose death had here been reversed and whose longevity had become a natural feature that only kept increasing, had somehow borrowed an authenticity from Alexei Afanasievich that Brezhnev himself had never possessed.”

Seemingly resonating with her characters, Slavnikova does not spare the satirical details in her depiction of post-Soviet public life—and especially of the elections—as a parade of clumsy simulacra. In a particularly hilarious scene, a charlatan named Professor Kuznetsov runs a “healing” séance in support of an election candidate. (I have a strong suspicion that Slavnikova wrote this scene “from nature”—a certain Kuznetsov enjoyed incredible popularity in the Ekaterinburg of the 1990s for selling various torture devices, such as clusters of small but very sharp plastic nails intended for standing or even lying upon—promising to heal all ailments and pains.) However, despite its “factographic” nature, this episode reads like a paraphrase of Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous séance of black magic from The Master and Margarita: the same barrage of lies and illusions, the same willingness of the audience to accept any phantasm for truth. Slavnikova’s explanation of the impact of these illusions is different, but the tone she adopts in this section is recognizably Bulgakov’s:

Unsurprisingly, against the background of post-Soviet political chimeras and childish phantasms, the Soviet past starts looking more real, more trustworthy than the current reality. But this is what people want to see, this is exactly how the optics of ressentiment works. Slavnikova’s text goes beyond this optical illusion. She tries to expose the nature of this “authenticity.”

What is so authentic about Alexei Afanasievich? His wartime past? It is embodied in the image of the noose made of strong silk rope with which he strangled a large number of German soldiers during his night raids. He carries this noose around his neck like a cross and never washes it, so that “the scout had a raw red stripe on the back of his neck, where the filthy noose rubbed his spine…In damp weather, Alexei Afanasievich would itch terribly from that crude mark forever after.” Alexei preserves the skill of re-creating his deadly noose out of any string as the last reflex of his paralyzed body.

Another motif associated with his wartime glory is the huge, gilded German bed that he brought home as a trophy and upon which he lies for the fourteen years of his paralysis. We learn that on this luxurious bed, Alexei also repeatedly raped his wife, Nina. The motif of rape in connection with the German bed serves to point at the unnamed by Slavnikova, but well-known to the Western reader, rampage of sexual violence during the Red Army’s victorious raid across Germany at the end of World War II.

It turns out that the authenticity of Alexei Afanasievich’s postwar experience is also quite questionable: “In all the decades of their life together, the Kharitonovs had never reminisced about anything together. They hadn’t accrued any symbolic property in common, such as any love, however brief, immediately tries to acquire.”

Eventually, Slavnikova’s analytical gaze reveals that the old scout’s authenticity has only one real foundation—his association with death: “There was something odd and even sinister to Alexei Afanasievich’s abnormal longevity.” A continuing reversal of meaning between life and death, blurring the distinction between these states, permeates the entire novel. Death is present not only in Alexei Afanasievich’s wartime past but also in his ice-cold family life after the war, and of course, in his present half-dead condition. A thick web of motifs associated with death surrounds this character, just as themes of sleepwalking surround Nina and themes of emptiness—Marina:

The similarity between death and sexuality in these passages is not a Freudian slip of the writer’s pen. Rather, this is the true meaning of nostalgia for “Soviet authenticity,” of the post-Soviet attraction to “Soviet glory”—it elevates death as the only authentic truth, the supreme social and individual value. In short, nostalgia is self-destructive, as the novel’s plot vividly demonstrates.

The interweaving of motifs associated with the novel’s characters as well as with the satirical representation of hidden electoral mechanisms produces a surreal effect that transforms Slavnikova’s seemingly realistic close-ups into a parade of monsters. Her text is inhabited by people who look like smaller copies of themselves, foreheads covered with natural wooden patterns, faces reminiscent of minerals: “His large face was made up of parts that looked sanded, without any wrinkles whatsoever, and between these broad patches of youth lay winding darknesses that also looked sanded, darknesses that retained the professor’s age, like soil in the cracks of a polished stone.” These transformations of the human into the nonhuman are coupled with opposite metamorphoses, when objects act like living beings. Consider “an awful old leather bag sewn from scraps that looked like a creation of Dr. Frankenstein’s…She’d hoped that the shapeless monster, to which she would never entrust even the smallest denomination of currency, would digest everything she didn’t want to remember during her tense daily labors and especially at night.” Or “the heavy bus, which kept dropping on its ass,” or the “shuddering elevator, whose buttons had turned into black ulcers long ago,” or the door, “which had occasionally dropped rusted-through wallpaper nails, like rotten teeth.” These monstrous creatures are the embodiment of ressentiment; they visibly materialize what is brewing inside people and inside the country. They manifest phantasms that occupy reality, taking control of time and space.

However, these spectacular metamorphoses add a supplementary dimension to The Man Who Couldn’t Die. Despite their depressing direct meaning, all these metaphors fill the novel’s style with wit, playfulness, and joyful estrangements. They establish tangible connections between Slavnikova’s novel and great literary predecessors—not only Bulgakov but also Andrei Bely, Dostoevsky, and Gogol. Through these links, Slavnikova situates post-Soviet ressentiment within a long (and wonderful) tradition of the Russian grotesque. This purely artistic twist offers a different perspective that overcomes the phantoms of the given time and suggests examples of productive distancing from contagious illusions shared by the majority.

Nietzsche argued that ressentiment “itself turns creative and gives birth to values.”[3] The Man Who Couldn’t Die shows exactly what kind of creativity and values the post-Soviet ressentiment gave birth to. Hopelessness and cynicism, a readiness to deceive and a willingness to be deceived, the valorization of death over life and of the past over the present (and future)—taken together they constitute the soil on which the aggressive nationalism and jingoism of the 2010s would breed. The art of distancing appears to be another value born out of ressentiment, and it offers a productive alternative, both intellectually and aesthetically, as Slavnikova’s novel dazzlingly demonstrates.

Olga Slavnikova has a very serious view of literature, comparing it with the hard, fundamental sciences and treasuring its complexity of vision above popularity. She says in an interview:

Obviously, this is her ambition as a writer. The Man Who Couldn’t Die accomplishes this maximalist program. The novel will stick in your mind like a splinter. It is as discomfiting as it is invigorating and provocative, yet its multifarious effects can change the picture of contemporary Russia by shaking numerous stereotypes and, at the very least, by eliding sweeping generalizations and oversimplifications about its past, present, and future.